1. Field of the Invention
This application relates to a method of using metadata to more precisely process content for display on a pixel-by-pixel basis.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the incremental cost of information and services delivered electronically approaches zero, consumers are unwilling or unable to pay in micropayments, i.e., electronic payments of miniscule amounts, such as a fraction of a Dollar or Euro, to receive this information, whether as a web page to be viewed with a web browser or in another electronic format. It is also too cumbersome and expensive to actually charge a consumer such a miniscule amount of money to view a single web page. Instead, consumers are granted free access to many, if not most, web pages. To generate revenue to cover at least a portion of the costs of delivering information and services electronically, businesses obtain “online” advertising from a third party “sponsor” to be displayed to visitors of the business' web site. The advertisements are displayed in a space or spaces on a web page devoted to the display of advertising. Typically, at least one of the advertisements is displayed as a banner at the top and/or bottom of the web page. The sponsor is often another web site operator who wishes to attract visitors to its web site using the advertisement; the sponsor may, but need not, have a relationship with the web site beyond the advertisement. Generally, a user need only click on the advertisement to transfer from the web page containing the advertisement to the sponsor's web page, which then appears in the web browser.
In the advertisement environment currently prevalent, sponsors of Internet advertisements often do not directly deal with the web site operator who displays the advertisement. Rather, an intermediary between the advertisement sponsor and the web site operator which carries the advertisement typically arranges the transaction, placing advertisements on web sites that attract a visitor having certain characteristics that match a desired audience for the sponsor's web site. The intermediary may also operate an ad server that downloads the advertisement to the user when the user visits a web page, exchange monies between the parties, and, in certain instances, track any transactions that result from a visit to the sponsor's web site.
The advertisers are generally charged for placing the advertisements on a web page on either a per-clickthrough or a per-impression basis. A per-clickthrough billing rate charges an advertising web site sponsoring the advertisement for each time a user clicked on the advertisement to visit the sponsor's web site. The per-clickthrough billing is usually metered by the sponsoring site and therefore only counts the number of actual visits to the sponsor's web site. This billing option is not always fair to the web site that displayed the sponsor's ad because, for technical or other reasons, clicking on the ad will not always cause the sponsor's web page to be displayed on the user's terminal, which means that they will not get paid for the clickthrough.
A per impression billing rate charges an advertiser each time the advertisement makes an impression on a user's terminal. This occurs when a web page is accessed using a web browser and an ad server transmits an advertisement for placement on the web page. There is no requirement that the advertisement actually be displayed, at least in part because of the current technical difficulty, if not impossibility, of insuring that the advertisement is displayed. The number of impressions is counted by the distributor of the advertisement, usually the intermediary. In this case, there is no measurement of actual delivery of information to a user. So, for example, if an ad space is located at the top of a typical web page which cannot be displayed all at once on a single screen, a user scrolls down the web page before an advertisement is loaded into the banner advertisement space at the top of the web page, and the user does not return to the top of that web page, the user never sees that advertisement, but the advertiser is charged anyway. If, however, a user spends a lot of time looking at the part of the web page that contains the advertisement, the advertiser is not billed extra beyond the charge for the single ad impression. This may be unfair to advertisement sponsors.
As charging on either a per-clickthrough or a per-impression basis has its shortcomings, it would be advantageous and fairer to both the ad sponsor and the web site operator bearing the sponsor's advertisement banner to have a system and method which allows an advertiser to be billed on a modified per-impression basis in which the advertiser is billed only for those impressions of advertisements onto a web page for the length of time the advertisements are actually viewed by a user and for the percentage of the advertisement viewed.
Moreover, as electronically-delivered information is presented and packaged more elaborately and in an increasingly sophisticated and complex way, it is challenging to establish a reasonable payment scheme for advertisers whose advertisements appear within a complex multimedia presentation. For example, an advertisement may be displayed within the context of a three-dimensional (3-D) presentation which might not be seen at all by a particular user, or might not even be readable because at a sharp angle to the viewer the advertisement is distorted or because the advertisement might be shown far in the distance and be difficult to discern. As another example, some users may choose to block advertisements from appearing on their screen by overlapping the window with the advertisement with another one or more windows or by some other software means. In these circumstances, it has not yet been determined how to best charge for an advertisement placed within the presentation.
At the same time, there is an increasing interest in blocking certain types of information. For example, users may not wish their children to view pornography or violent imagery. Also, many companies would like to have a means of preventing the playing of video games (video games) on office computers. While these examples offer scenarios where a user may wish to block all of a particular type of content, in some cases, a user may wish to block only a portion of a multimedia document and permit the remainder of the document to be displayed, as only that portion may have offensive or otherwise undesirable material.
One means of blocking undesirable information is through the use of metadata (i.e. structured information about information) that is inserted into a document, on a per document basis, in a manner that is invisible to the user to classify the document as a whole as belonging to a particular class, such as pornographic material. Current filtering software can then be used to scan the document for metadata and block a full page or other multimedia object containing certain metadata, but, metadata is often not sufficiently precise or accurate. As a result, the filtering software often blocks content which should not be blocked or fails to block content which should be blocked. It would be advantageous to have a more precise way of filtering out exactly the information which needs to be filtered and leave the remaining unfiltered information for display.
Computer graphics displays display images using thousands of pixels generally arranged into rows and columns. The greater the number of pixels on a display of a particular size, the greater the display's resolution. Each pixel shows a small portion of the image and is represented in video memory by a certain number of bits, the number depending on the available amount of memory and the amount of information required for displaying the pixel. An RGB color graphics system comprises information for color pixels formed by red, green and blue dots that essentially overlap to form the desired color. These colors are conventionally represented in a 32 bit graphics system using four 8 bit channels: three channels are used to encode information for pixels for each of the three colors, and a fourth channel, known as the alpha channel, provides transparency information for blending the three colors. The alpha channel is usually set to be identical for a group of adjacent pixels that form an object or portion of an object.
As graphics cards evolve to allow for more bits to be allocated per pixel, some of the additional bits have been used to add a virtual third dimension (a z-axis) to an image a Z-buffer. The Z-buffer is used in 3-D graphics to specify, where there are multiple objects that share an x- and y-coordinate, which objects or portions thereof should be visible and which should be hidden (by being overlaid with another object). Further bits may be added for other various and sundry purposes. It would be advantageous to utilize additional available bits to insert metadata for more precise metering and filtering of information.